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by WalterBright 1404 days ago
Once I knew what process shots were, I just can't unsee them in older movies. In particular, where the actors are driving in a car, when the background is clearly a rear projection on a screen.

It's also obvious that the windshield has been removed for the filming.

5 comments

Not not mention that they tug the steering wheel back and forth as if they were playing real life frogger just to signal that they are "busy doing something". This doesn't make sense either.
My personal "favourite" is the driver constantly turning to face the person on the other seat because they are having a conversation, you see.

Is Hollywood intentionally normalizing this dangerous behaviour? Assholes

> Is Hollywood intentionally normalizing this dangerous behaviour?

Not to speak of all the car races and shootings ...

It always seemed to me like there was a simple solution. Record the steering wheel movements of the stunt car. Use a motor in the fake car to replay the steering wheel movements.
Not so simple before widespread computers in cars ?
I find that even real, natural driving shots often look fake, but I'm not sure why. I've accused a film maker friend twice of using "janky and obvious looking greenscreen" for driving shots and both times I was completely wrong. Once was a car on a trailer which might have accounted for some of the unnatutalness, but the second time was a real quad bike driving on a real road with a chase car in front of it and a backwards facing camera-person.
Some films (and a lot of TV shows in the 80s/90s) often got the angle of the projection wrong as well, so there's an obvious miss-match between the perspective of the interior of the car and the outside... i.e. the angle of the camera in the car is roughly horizontal, but the projection is looking upwards towards the sky at around 10/15 degrees.

Another obvious (when you know what you're looking for) tell-tale if the projection is better, is the light direction / shadows within the car compared to what the car's doing: car turns left 90 degrees, but oh no, the sun's still coming from the same direction as before...

> It's also obvious that the windshield has been removed for the filming.

Also elevator shots!

Have you ever counted how many hub caps Steve McQueen’s mustang lost in the famous Bullitt chase scene?